Tips, advice, and blogs by our Typepad community.

By default, the front page of your Typepad blog will display the 10 most recent posts you've published, with the most recent at the top. This is a very common format, but sometimes you may want to configure your blog a bit differently. In this post, we will look at some of the different options Typepad offers for the front page of your blog.

Ten posts is usually a good number to display on the front page. People who would like to read back in your blog don't have to keep hitting the next page all the time, while at the same time the page doesn't get too long and unwieldy. If your posts are quite long or very short, however, you might want to adjust the number up or down. Or maybe you're doing something very different with your blog - our example photo showcase blog has just one post on each page so that it looks like a photo album.

To change the number of posts on the front page, go to the Settings > Posts page for your blog and look for the Posts to Display section. You can display a certain number of posts or even a certain number of days of posts (we only recommend using the Days setting if you post regularly or on a consistent schedule). Enter the number that you want to display and use the drop-down menu to choose posts or days, then scroll down to the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Maybe 10 posts is a good number, but you're using your blog to tell a story that you'd like people to read from the beginning. In this case, you may want to have your blog display oldest posts first. Do be aware that if you use this format, readers who arrive at your blog won't easily be able to tell if or when you have published a new post. However, if you're using your blog to tell a complete narrative and won't be adding to it, the "oldest first" display might be ideal for your needs.

To adjust the display order, go to Settings > Posts and scroll down to the Order of Posts section. Choose either newest or oldest first, then save your changes.

Another way that you can customize the display of your front page is to only display posts from certain categories. For instance, you might want more of a magazine format for your blog and to display only featured articles on the front page. Or maybe you have one or more categories you don't want on the front page, but you would like to display all of the other categories. First, make sure you know how to configure categories for your posts. Also, keep in mind that visitors arriving at your blog may not be aware that you have categories other than the ones that appear on the front page. We recommend displaying a listing of all categories using the Categories sidebar module or linking to categories using the navigation bar.

Once you've got everything set up with your categories, head on over to the Settings > Posts page and look for the section called Limit Recent Posts. When you click on the drop-down menu here, you'll see options to add a new category or to assign multiple categories and also a listing of all the categories on your blog. If you choose one of the categories in the listing, only the posts in that category will appear on the front page of your blog. Set up the category or categories you want to display, then save your changes.

All of these options are great, but perhaps you don't want to display your posts on the front page of your blog at all. Maybe you want to set up a landing page with important information for your readers, or you want to use your blog more like a website instead of having a stream of recent posts. First, you'll need to create the informational Page with the content for your landing page. If you plan to have posts as well as one or more Pages, you'll want to be sure to provide a link to the recent posts page in the sidebar or navigation bar.

On the Settings > Posts page, look for the Front Page section. Choose the option to display a Page and then select the Page that you want to use. After saving your changes, you will see that the Front Page section now lists the URL for the recent posts page for your blog. Be sure to copy this URL so that you can set up the link in your navigation bar!

One other Typepad feature you may want to take advantage of in combination with any of the options discussed above - or just by itself if you want to - is the recently-added auto-generated excerpts option. This is especially helpful if you tend to write longer posts but you want to keep the front page of your blog from getting too long. You can use the split extended entry feature to manually create an introduction for each page, but if that's too much effort, just head on over to Settings > Posts and turn on the Auto-Generated Excerpts option. You can also choose whether or not to include a featured image. We recommend turning on this option to add more pop to your excerpts.

Here's what your published posts will look like with the featured image option selected:

There you have it - five ways to shake up the front page of your blog. Have you customized the display of your front page? Tell us about it and share a link in the comments!

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